The wide adoption of mobile devices along with ubiquitous cellular data coverage has resulted in an explosive growth of mobile applications that expect always-accessible wireless networking. This explosion has placed strains on resources that are scarce in the mobile world. On the user side, dropped calls and poor communication have been blamed for user dissatisfaction. On the network side, wireless service providers are observing an exponential growth in mobile communications due to both an increase in consumer demand and commercial requirements. To ensure customer satisfaction, wireless service providers aim to deliver a high quality service at any location, to facilitate reliable and efficient mobile communications. Moreover, to improve wireless coverage and reduce dead zones, wireless service providers can typically add and/or replace front-end equipment to realize effective bandwidth increases.
Video streaming, data streaming, and broadband digital broadcast programming are increasing in popularity in wireless network applications. To support these wireless applications, wireless service providers provide systems that transmit data content as data packets. Data packets can be lost, corrupted, or out of order when received by a network device.